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FOREWORD
John Chapman, known in legend, drama, poem, and song as
Johnny Appleseed, has become a favorite American folk hero. He
was a familiar figure in Fort Wayne in the I830's and died near the
city in 1845. The following biographical sketch by W. D. Haley
was originally published in HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE,
volume XLIII, November, 1871. That article is the nucleus of fact
and legend current in 1871, twenty-six years after Johnny's death;
it is the chief source of subsequent articles and sketches.
The Boards and the Staff of the Public Library of Fort Wayne
and Allen County reprint the article with the assurance that it will
be interesting and informative to Library patrons.
The "Far West" is rapidly becoming only a traditional
designation; railroads have destroyed the romance of frontier
life or have surrounded it with so many appliances of civi-
lization that the pioneer character is rapidly becoming myth-
ical. The men and women who obtain their groceries and
dry-goods from New York by rail in a few hours have noth-
ing in common with those who, fifty years ago, "packed"
salt a hundred miles to make their mush palatable and could
only exchange corn and wheat for molasses and calico by
making long and perilous voyages in flat-boats down the Ohio
and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Two generations of
frontier lives have accumulated stores of narrative , which,
like the small but beautiful tributaries of great rivers, are
forgotten in the broad sweep of the larger current of history.
The march of Titans sometinnes tramples out the memory
of smaller, but more useful,lives, and sensational glare often
eclipses more modest but purer lights. This has been the
case in the popular demand for the dime novel dilutions of
Fenimore Cooper's romances of border life, which have
preserved the records of Indian rapine and atrocity as the
only memorials of pioneer history. But the early days of
Western settlement witnessed sublimer heroisms than those
of human torture, and nobler victories than those of the tom-
ahawk and scalping -knife.
Among the heroes of endurance that was voluntary
and of action that was creative and not sanguinary, there
was one man whose name, seldom mentioned now save by
some of the few surviving pioneers, deserves to be perpet-
uated.
The first reliable trace of our modest hero finds him
in the Territory of Ohio, in 1801, with a horse-load of apple
seeds, which he planted in various places on and about the
borders of Licking Creek -the first orchard thus originated
by him being on the farm of Isaac Stadden, in what is now
known as Licking County, in the state of Ohio. During the
five succeeding years, although he was undoubtedly following
the same strange occupation, we have no authentic account
of his movements until we reach a pleasant spring day in
1806, when a pioneer settler in Jefferson County, Ohio, no-
ticed a peculiar craft, with a remarkable occupant and a
curious cargo, slowly dropping down with the current of the
Ohio River. It was "Johnny Appleseed," by which name
Jonathan Chapman was afterward known in every log-cabin
from the Ohio River to the northern lakes and westward to
the prairies of what is now the state of Indiana. With two
canoes lashed together, he was transporting a load of apple
seeds to the western frontier, for the purpose of creating
orchards on the farthest verge of white settlements. With
his canoes he passed down the Ohio to Marietta, where he
entered the Muskingum, ascending the stream of that river
until he reached the mouth of the Walhonding, or White
Wonnan Creek, and still onward, up the Mohican, into the
Black Fork, to the head of navigation in the region now
known as Ashland and Richland counties, on the line of the
Pittsburg and Fort Wayne Railroad, in Ohio. A long and
toilsome voyage it was, as a glance at the map will show,
and must have occupied a great deal of time, as the lonely
traveler stopped at every inviting spot to plant the seeds and
make his infant nurseries. These are the first well-authen-
ticated facts in the history of Jonathan Chapman, whose
birth, there is good reason for believing, occurred in Bos-
ton, Massachusetts, in 1775. According to this, which was
his own statement in one of his less reticent moods, he was,
at the time of his appearance on Licking Creek, twenty-six
years of age; and whether impelled in his eccentricities by
some absolute misery of the heart which could only find re-
lief in incessant motion or governed by a benevolent mono-
mania, his whole after-life was devoted to the work of plant-
ing apple seeds in remote places. The seeds he gathered
from the cider -pres ses of western Pennsylvania; but his
canoe voyage in 1806 appears to have been the only occasion
upon which he adopted that method of transporting them, as
all his subsequent journeys were made on foot. Having
planted his stock of seeds, he would return to Pennsylvania
for a fresh supply; and, as sacks made of any less substan-
tial fabric would not endure the hard usage of the long trip
through forests dense with underbrush and briers, he pro-
vided himself with leathern bags. Securely packed, the
Johnny Apple seed.
(HARPER'S MAGAZINE, November, 1871)
seeds were conveyed, sometimes on the back of a horse,
and not unfrequently on his own shoulders, either over a
part of the old Indian trail that led from Fort Duquesne to
Detroit, by way of Fort Sandusky, or over what is styled in
the appendix to "Hutchins's History of Boguet's Expedition
in 1764" the "second route through the wilderness of Ohio,"
which would require him to traverse a distance of one hun-
dred and sixty-six miles in a west-northwest direction from
Fort Duquesne in order to reach the Black Fork of the Mo-
hican.
This region, although it is now densely populated, still
possesses a romantic beauty that railroads and bustling
towns can not obliterate--a country of forest-clad hills and
green valleys, through which numerous bright streams flow
on their way to the Ohio; but when Johnny Appleseed reached
some lonely log-cabin he would find himself in a veritable
wilderness. The old settlers say that the margins of the
streams, near which the first settlements were generally
made, were thickly covered with a low, matted growth of
small timber, while nearer to the water was a rank mass of
long grass, interlaced with morning-glory and wild pea
vines, among which funereal willows and clustering alders
stood like sentinels on the outpost of civilization. The hills,
that rise almost to the dignity of mountains, were crowned
with forest trees; and in the coverts were innumerable
bears, wolves, deer, and droves of wild hogs that were as
ferocious as any beast of prey. In the grass the massasauga
and other venomous reptiles lurked in such numbers that a
settler named Chandler has left the fact on record that dur-
ing the first season of his residence, while mowing a little
prairie which formed part of his land, he killed over two
hundred black rattlesnakes in an area that would involve an
average destruction of one of these reptiles for each rod of
land. The frontiers-man, who felt himself sufficiently pro-
tected by his rifle against wild beasts and hostile Indians,
found it necessary to guard against the attacks of the insid-
ious enemies in the grass by wrapping bandages of dried
grass around his buckskin leggings and moccasins; but John-
ny would shoulder his bag of apple seeds, and with bare feet
penetrate to some remote spot that combined picturesque-
ness and fertility of soil; and there he would plant his seeds,
place a slight inclosure around the place, and leave them to
grow until the trees were large enough to be transplanted
by the settlers, who in the mean time would have made
their clearings in the vicinity. The sites chosen by him
are, many of them, well known and are such as an artist
or a poet would select; open places on the loamy lands that
border the creeks--rich, secluded spots, hemmed in by
giant trees, picturesque now, but fifty years ago, with their
wild surroundings and the primal silence, they must have
been tenfold more so.
In personal appearance Chapman was a small, wiry
man, full of restless activity; he had long dark hair, a scanty
beard that was never shaved, and keen black eyes that spar-
kled with a peculiar brightness. His dress was of the odd-
est description. Generally, even in the coldest weather, he
went barefooted; but sometinnes for his long journeys he
would make himself a rude pair of sandals; at other times
he would wear any cast-off foot-covering he chanced to find- -
a boot on one foot and an old brogan or a moccasin on the
other. It appears to have been a matter of conscience with
him never to purchase shoes, although he was rarely with-
out money enough to do so. On one occasion, in an unusually
cold November, while he was traveling barefooted through
mud and snow, a settler who happened to possess a pair of
shoes that were too snnall for his own use forced their ac-
ceptance upon Johnny, declaring that it was sinful for a hu-
man being to travel with naked feet in such weather. A few
days afterward the donor was in the village that has since
become the thriving city of Mansfield and met his benefi-
ciary contentedly plodding along with his feet bare and half
frozen. With some degree of anger.he inquired for the cause
of such foolish conduct and received for reply that Johnny
had overtaken a poor, barefooted family moving westward,
and as they appeared to be in much greater need of clothing
than he was, he had given them the shoes. His dress was
generally composed of cast-off clothing that he had taken
in payment for apple-trees; and as the pioneers were far
less extravagant than their descendants in such matters, the
homespun and buckskin garments that they discarded would
not be very elegant or serviceable. In his later years, how-
ever, he seems to have thought that even this kind of second-
hand raiment was too luxurious, as his principal garment
was made of a coffee sack, in which he cut holes for his head
and arms to pass through, and pronounced it "a very serv-
iceable cloak and as good clothing as any man need wear. "
In the matter of head-gear,his taste was equally unique; his
first experiment was with a tin vessel that served to cook
his mush; but this was open to the objection that it did not
protect his eyes from the beams of the sun, so he constructed
a hat of pasteboard with an immense peak in front, and hav-
ing thus secured an article that combined usefulness with
economy, it becanne his permanent fashion.
Thus strangely clad, he was perpetually wandering
through forests and morasses and suddenly appearing in
white settlements and Indian villages; but there must have
been some rare force of gentle goodness dwelling in his
looks and breathing in his words, for it is the testimony of
all who knew him that, notwithstanding his ridiculous attire,
he was always treated with the greatest respect by the rud-
est frontiers -man; and, what is a better test, the boys of
the settlements forbore to jeer at him. With grown-up peo-
ple and boys he was usually reticent but manifested great
affection for little girls, always having pieces of ribbon and
gay calico to give to his little favorites. Many a grandmoth-
er in Ohio and Indiana can remember the presents she re-
ceived, when a child,from poor homeless Johnny Appleseed.
When he consented to eat with any family,he would never sit
down to the table until he was assured that there was an am-
ple supply for the children; and his sympathy for their youth-
ful troubles and his kindness toward them made him friends
among all the juveniles of the borders.
The Indians also treated Johnny with the greatest kind-
ness. By these wild and sanguinary savages,he was regarded
as a "great medicine man, " on account of his strange ap-
pearance, eccentric actions, and, especially, the fortitude
with which he could endure pain, in proof of which he would
"The tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a
devouring flame foUoweth after them. "
(HARPER'S MAGAZINE , November, 1871)
often thrust pins and needles into his flesh. His nervous
sensibilities really seem to have been less acute than those
of ordinary people, for his method of treating the cuts and
sores that were the consequences of his bare -footed wander-
ings through briers and thorns was to sear the wo\ind with a
red-hot iron, and then cure the burn. During the war of
1812, when the frontier settlers were tortured and slaugh-
tered by the savage allies of Great Britain, Johnny Apple-
seed continued his wanderings and was never harmed by
the roving bands of hostile Indians, On many occasions the
impunity with which he ranged the country enabled him to
give the settlers warning of approaching danger in tinne to
allow them to take refuge in their block-houses before the
savages could attack them. Our informant refers to one of
these instances, when the news of Hull's surrender came
like a thunder-bolt upon the frontier. Large bands of Indians
and British were destroying every thing before them and
murdering defenseless women and children, and even the
block-houses were not always a sufficient protection. At
this time Johnny traveled day and night, warning the people
of the approaching danger. He visited every cabin and de-
livered this message: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
and he hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilder-
ness and sound an alarm in the forest; for, behold, the
tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a de-
vouring flame followeth after them," The aged man who
narrated this incident said that he could feel even now the
thrill that was caused by this prophetic announcement of the
wild-looking herald of danger, who aroused the family on a
bright moonlight midnight with his piercing voice. Refusing
all offers of food and denying himself a moment's rest, he
traversed the border day and night until he had warned every
settler of the approaching peril.
His diet was as meagre as his clothing. He believed
it to be a sin to kill any creature for food and thought that
all that was necessary for human sustenance was produced
by the soil. He was also a strenuous opponent of the waste
of food, and on one occasion, on approaching a log-cabin, he
observed some fragments of bread floating upon the surface of
a bucket of slops that was intended for the pigs. He innme-
diately fished them out; and when the housewife expressed
her astonishment, he told her that it was an abuse of the
gifts of a merciful God to allow the smallest quantity of any
thing that was designed to supply the wants of mankind to be
diverted from its purpose.
In this instance, as in his whole life, the peculiar re-
ligious ideas of Johnny Appleseed were exemplified. He was
a most earnest disciple of the faith taught by Emanuel Swe-
denborg, and himself claimed to have frequent conversations
with angels and spirits; two of the latter, of the feminine
gender, he asserted, had revealed to him that they were to
be his wives in a future state if he abstained from a matri-
monial alliance on earth. He entertained a profound rever-
ence for the revelations of the Swedish seer and always
carried a few old volumes with him. These he was very
anxious should be read by every one, and he was probably
not only the first colporteur in the wilderness of Ohio, but
as he had no tract society to furnish him supplies, he cer-
tainly devised an original method of multiplying one book in-
to a number. He divided his books into several pieces, leav-
ing a portion at a log-cabin, and on a subsequent visit fur-
nishing another fragment, and continuing this process as
diligently as though the work had been published in serial
numbers. By this plan he was enabled to furnish reading
for several people at the same time and out of one book;
but it must have been a difficult undertaking for some nearly
illiterate backwoodsman to endeavor to comprehend Sweden-
borg by a backward course of reading, when his first in-
stallment happened to be the last fraction of the volume.
Johnny's faith in Swedenborg's works was so reverential as
almost to be superstitious. He was once asked if, in trav-
eling barefooted through forests abounding with venomous
reptiles, he was not afraid of being bitten. With his peculiar
smile, he drew his book from his bosom and said, "This
book is an infallible protection against all danger here and
hereafter. "
It was his custom, when he had been welcomed to
Sonne hospitable log-house after a weary day of journeying.
to lie down on the puncheon floor, and, after inquiring if his
auditors would hear "some news right fresh from heaven,"
produce his few tattered books, among which would be a New
Testament, and read and expound until his uncultivated hear-
ers would catch the spirit and glow of his enthusiasm, while
they scarcely comprehended his language. A lady who knew
him in his later years writes in the following terms of one
of these domiciliary readings of poor, self-sacrificing John-
ny Appleseed: "We can hear hinn read now, just as he did
that summer day when we were busy quilting up stairs, and
he lay near the door; his voice rose denunciatory and thrill-
ing--strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then
soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morn-
ing-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange
eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius. "
What a scene is presented to our imagination: the interior
of a primitive cabin; the wide, open fire-place, where a few
sticks are burning beneath the iron pot in which the evening
meal is cooking; around the fire-place the attentive group,
composed of the sturdy pioneer and his wife and children,
listening with a reverential awe to the "news right fresh from
heaven"; and reclining on the floor, clad in rags, but with
his gray hairs glorified by the beams of the setting sun that
flood through the open door and the unchinked logs of the
humble building, this poor wanderer with the gift of genius
and eloquence, who believes with the faith of apostles and
martyrs that God has appointed him a mission in the wilder-
ness to preach the Gospel of love and plant apple seeds that
shall produce orchards for the benefit of men, and women,
and little children whom he has never seen. If there is a
sublimer faith or a more genuine eloquence in richly deco-
rated cathedrals and under brocade vestments, it would be
worth a long journey to find it.
Next to his advocacy of his peculiar religious ideas,
his enthusiasm for the cultivation of apple-trees in what he
termed "the only proper way"--that is, from the seed--was
the absorbing object of his life. Upon this, as upon religion,
he was eloquent inhis appeals. He would describe the grow-
ing and ripening fruit as such a rare and beautiful gift of the
10
"News right fresh from heaven. "
(HARPER'S MAGAZINE, November, 1871)
Almighty with words that became pictures, until his hearers
could almost see its manifold forms of beauty present before
them. To his eloquence on this subject as well as to his
actual labors in planting nurseries, the country over which
he traveled for so many years is largely indebted for its nu-
merous orchards. But he denounced as absolute wickedness
all devices of pruning and grafting and would speak of the
act of cutting a tree as if it were a cruelty inflicted upon a
sentient being.
Not only is he entitled to the fame of being the earliest
colporteur on the frontiers, but in the work of protecting
animals from abuse and suffering, he preceded; while, in his
smaller sphere, he equaled the zeal of the good Mr. Bergh.
Whenever Johnny saw an animal abused, or heard of it, he
would purchase it and give it to some more humane settler,
on condition that it should be kindly treated and properly
cared for. It frequently happened that the long journey into
the wilderness would cause the new settlers to be encum-
bered with lame and broken-down horses, that were turned
loose to die. In the autumn Johnny would make a diligent
search for all such animals, and, gathering them up, he
would bargain for their food and shelter until the next spring,
when he would lead them away to some good pasture for the
summer. If they recovered so as to be capable of working,
he would never sell them but would lend or give them away,
stipulating for their good usage. His conception of the ab-
solute sin of inflicting pain or death upon any creature was
not limited to the higher forms of animal life, but every
thing that had being was to him, in the fact of its life, en-
dowed with so much of the Divine Essence that to wound or
destroy it was to inflict an injury upon some atom of Divin-
ity. No Brahmin could be more concerned for the preser-
vation of insect life; and the only occasion on which he de-
stroyed a venomous reptile was a source of long regret, to
which he could never refer without manifesting sadness. He
had selected a suitable place for planting apple seeds on a
small prairie; and, in order to prepare the ground, he was
mowing the long grass, when he was bitten by a rattlesnake.
In describing the event, he sighed heavily, and said, "Poor
12
fellow, he only just touched me, when I, in the heat of my
ungodly passion, put the heel of my scythe in hinn and went
away. Sonne time afterward I went back, and there lay the
poor fellow dead. " Numerous anecdotes bearing upon his
respect for every form of life are preserved and form the
staple of pioneer recollections. On one occasion, a cool au-
tumnal night, when Johnny, who always camped out in pref-
erence to sleeping in a house, had built a fire near which he
intended to pass the night, he noticed that the blaze attracted
large numbers of mosquitoes, many of whom flew too near
to his fire and were burned. He immediately brought water
and quenched the fire, accounting for his conduct afterward
by saying, "God forbid that I should build a fire for my com-
fort which should be the means of destroying any of His crea-
tures!" At another time he removed the fire he had built
near a hollow log and slept on the snow, because he found
that the log contained a bear and her cubs, whom, he said,
he did not wish to disturb. And this unwillingness to inflict
pain or death was equally strong when he was a sufferer by
it, as the following will show. Johnny had been assisting
some settlers to make a road through the woods, and in the
course of their work, they accidentally destroyed a hornets'
nest. One of the angry insects soon found a lodgment under
Johnny's coffee-sack cloak, but although it stung him re-
peatedly, he removed it with the greatest gentleness. The
men who were present laughingly asked him why he did not
kill it. To which he gravely replied that "It would not be
right to kill the poor thing, for it did not intend to hurt me. "
Theoretically,he was as methodical in matters of busi-
ness as any nnerchant. In addition to their picturesqueness,
the locations of his nurseries were all fixed with a view to
a probable demand for the trees by the time they had attained
sufficient growth for transplanting. He would give them
away to those who could not pay for them. Generally, how-
ever, he sold them for old clothing or a supply of corn meal;
but he preferred to receive a note payable at some indefinite
period. When this was accomplished, he seemed to think
that the transaction was completed in a business-like way;
but if the giver of the note did not attend to its payment, the
13
holder of it never troubled himself about its collection. His
expenses for food and clothing were so very limited that,
notwithstanding his freedom from the auri sacra fames , he
was frequently in possession of more money than he cared
to keep; and it was quickly disposed of for wintering infirm
horses or given to some poor family whom the ague had
prostrated or the accidents of border life impoverished. In
a single instance only he is known to have invested his sur-
plus means in the purchase of land, having received a deed
from Alexander Finley, of Mohican Township, Ashland Coun-
ty, Ohio, for a part of the southwest quarter of section
twenty-six; but with his customary indifference to matters
of value, Johnny failed to record the deed, and lost it. Only
a few years ago the property was in litigation.
We must not leave the reader under the impression
that this man's life, so full of hardship and perils, was a
gloomy or unhappy one. There is an element of human pride
in all martyrdom, which, if it does not soften the pains,
stimulates the power of endurance. Johnny's life was made
serenely happy by the conviction that he was living like the
primitive Christians. Nor was he devoid of a keen humor
to which he occasionally gave vent, as the following will
show. Toward the latter part of Johnny's career in Ohio an
itinerant missionary found his way to the village of Mans-
field and preached to an open-air congregation. The dis-
course was tediously lengthy and unnecessarily severe up-
on the sin of extravagance, which was beginning to manifest
itself among the pioneers by an occasional indulgence in the
carnal vanities of calico and "store tea. " There was a good
deal of the Pharisaic leaven in the preacher, who very fre-
quently emphasized his discourse by the inquiry, "Where
now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is
traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?"
When this interrogation had been repeated beyond all rea-
sonable endurance, Johnny rose from the log on which he
was reclining; and advancing to the speaker, he placed one
of his bare feet upon the stump which served for a pulpit',
and pointing to his coffee -sack garment, he quietly said,
"Here's your primitive Christian!" The well-clothed mis-
14
"Here's your primitive Christian."
(HARPER'S MAGAZINE, November, 1871)
sionary hesitated^and stammered, and dismissed the congre-
gation. His pet antithesis was destroyed by Johnny's per-
sonal appearance, which was far more primitive than the
preacher cared to copy.
Some of the pioneers were disposed to think that John-
ny's humor was the cause of an extensive practical joke; but
it is generally conceded now that a wide -spread annoyance
was really the result of his belief that the offensively odored
weed known in the West as the dog-fennel, but more gener-
ally styled the May-weed, possessed valuable antimalarial
virtues. He procured some seeds of the plant in Pennsyl-
vania and sowed them in the vicinity of every house in the
region of his travels. The consequence was that successive,
flourishing crops of the weed spread over the whole country
and caused alnnost as much trouble as the disease it was in-
tended to ward off; and to this day the dog-fennel, introduced
by Johnny Appleseed, is one of the worst grievances of the
Ohio farmers.
In 1838- -thirty-seven years after his appearance on
Licking Creek-- Johnny noticed that civilization, wealth, and
population were pressing into the wilderness of Ohio. Hith-
erto he had easily kept just in advance of the wave of settle-
ment; but now towns and churches were making their ap-
pearance, and even, at long intervals, the stage-driver's
horn broke the silence of the grand old forests, and he felt
that his work was done in the region in which he had labored
so long. He visited every house, and took a solennn farewell
of all the families. The little girls who had been delighted
with his gifts of fragments of calico and ribbons had become
sober matrons, and the boys who had wondered at his ability
to bear the pain caused by running needles into his flesh
were heads of families. With parting words of admonition,
he left them and turned his steps steadily toward the set-
ting sun.
During the succeeding nine years, he pursued his ec-
centric avocation on the western border of Ohio and in Indi-
ana. In the summer of 1847, when his labors had literally
borne fruit over a hundred thousand square miles of terri-
tory, at the close of a warm day, after traveling twenty
16
miles, he entered the house of a settler in Allen County, In-
diana, and was as usual warmly welcomed. He declined
to eat with the family but accepted some bread and milk,
which he partook of sitting on the door -step and gazing on
the setting sun. Later in the evening he delivered his "news
right fresh from heaven" by reading the Beatitudes. De-
clining other accommodation, he slept as usual on the
floor; and in the early morning he was found with his fea-
tures all aglow with a supernal light and his body so near
death that his tongue refused its office. The physician, who
was hastily summoned, pronounced him dying but added
that he had never seen a man in so placid a state at the ap-
proach of death. At seventy-two years of age, forty-six of
which had been devoted to his self-imposed mission, he rip-
ened into death as naturally and beautifully as the seeds of
his own planting had grown into fibre and bud and blossom
and the matured fruit.
Thus died one of the nnemorable men of pioneer times,
who never inflicted pain or knew an enemy- -a man of strange
habits, in whom there dwelt a comprehensive love that
reached with one hand downward to the lowest forms of life
and with the other upward to the very throne of God. A la-
boring, self-denying benefactor of his race, homeless, sol-
itary, and ragged, he trod the thorny earth with bare and
bleeding feet, intent only upon making the wilderness fruit-
ful. Now, "no man knoweth of his sepulchre"; but his deeds
will live in the fragrance of the apple blossoms he loved so
well; and the story of his life, however crudely narrated,
will be a perpetual proof that true heroism, pure benevo-
lence, noble virtues, and deeds that deserve immortality
may be found under meanest apparel and far from gilded
halls and towering spires.
17
HECKMAN IXI
BINDERY INC. |§|
JUN95
Bo.a.To-P,e..N^MANCHESTER,